BATON ROUGE, La. — Days before Thanksgiving, perhaps hours after quarterback recruit Bryce Underwood’s stunning decision to shift his commitment from LSU to Michigan, a 50-year-old private equity executive in San Francisco worth billions fielded a phone call from someone in South Louisiana.
“Holden,” the voice on the other side said, “Can you help?”
Every fundraising effort has to start somewhere.
This one, in particular, began with Holden Spaht, a Harvard Business School graduate, Baton Rouge native and a mostly unknown figure who has worked in the shadows for years, with a small handful of others, to fund LSU football’s name, image and likeness (NIL) efforts.
In late November, the Tigers saddled with a third straight season of at least three losses, their five-star quarterback commitment jettisoned for more cash and their football NIL fund below many SEC peers, coach Brian Kelly and administrators orchestrated a fundraising effort intended to aggressively pursue transfers and retain top players.
In less than two weeks last December, they needed to raise at least half of their springtime NIL goal of $13 million, which, in itself, was an already lofty objective given a startling fact: Despite its reputation as an NIL juggernaut — featuring stars of authentic endorsement deals like gymnast Livvy Dunne and women’s basketball player Angel Reese — the football program’s booster-backed NIL collective budget trailed many within its own conference.
LSU’s collective spent roughly $12 million on its football roster over the last three seasons — combined. For comparison’s sake, the Ole Miss collective spent about $13 million on its roster — last season.
Even athletic director Scott Woodward acknowledges that the program wasn’t “at the top of the heap early on.”
But this winter, a sea change happened here on the bayou.
A program whose coach only last May announced at a news conference that he wasn’t “in the market of buying players” mobilized like never before. The fundraising blitzkrieg, starting with that phone call out West, featured presentations to donors of the program’s new, NFL-like roster valuation system. Kelly, himself, made visits to Baton Rouge offices of business owners and pledged to match up to $1 million in LSU NIL contributions with a donation to the school’s athletics fund.
The result? Multiple seven-figure gifts arrived. It was a last gasp to cap off the industry’s four-year NIL era of boosters funding rosters before the arrival in July of a revenue-sharing concept that permits schools to directly pay players.
The cash flow — a majority of it from three to five donors — helped deliver a 16-man, top-ranked transfer portal class in the country, retain stars like edge rusher Harold Perkins, land a top-10 ranked group of high school signees and, perhaps, avoid a cataclysmic and historic happening: LSU, of all programs, being left behind.
“We’ve contributed donations because I have felt, to be honest with you, that there will be change,” said Pepper Rutland, who gave a seven-figure gift for the portal push. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see major college football leave the NCAA, and I’m afraid if you don’t do this and stay in the mix, you may be irrelevant when that change happens. You may be a school that doesn’t come back from it.
“It’s a money game now.”
The Plan
LSU is not alone in its campaign this winter.
Dozens of power conference programs are hustling to reach eight-figure donation goals or are exhausting their collective bank accounts in an effort to distribute funds to athletes before the arrival in July of the new revenue-sharing era and its more stringent enforcement arm. All payments made to athletes starting July 1 are subject to a new enforcement entity that is expected to reject many of these lucrative booster-backed deals so prevalent over the last four years.
As a result, schools and their affiliated collectives have designed contracts for players that distribute all or a large portion of compensation to them before July 1 — a concept described as “frontloading.” This is a way to not only avoid the new enforcement arm but to create flexibility with a school’s revenue-share pool next year. The cash distributed before July does not count against a program’s revenue-share pool cap.
“It’s the one year you can manipulate the cap,” acknowledged Michael Alford, the FSU athletic director.
Some programs are frontloading as much as $16 million, according to those with knowledge of the plans. They then have an additional $20.5 million in revenue-share pool to spend starting July 1, carrying over much of that cash to the 2026 roster. The revenue-share pool cap is based on the academic calendar. Year 1, for instance, runs from July 2025 through June 2026 before a new cap year begins.
“Schools are getting as much money off the books as they can,” said Russell White, the president of The Collective Association, a group of the most lucrative booster collectives. “There will be some big paydays.”
In Baton Rouge, the specific figure has been established.
“We are frontloading at a level where we are trying to get to or above $13 million,” Kelly told Yahoo Sports last month in an interview from his office. A portion of that $13 was used to support last season’s team. LSU expects to frontload roughly $10 million of it before July 1.
The $13 million is more than the collective distributed the past three football rosters combined: $5.5 million last year, about $4 million in 2023 and $2 million in 2022.
“We thought, ‘Let’s push all the chips in,’” said Spaht, general counsel and former co-manager of the LSU collective Bayou Traditions. “It’s not just because we want to perform better on the field and win a national championship, but the back-counting of these collective dollars will essentially allow revenue-share dollars to go further.”
Blake Lawrence, the CEO of the NIL platform Opendorse, estimates that at least one-third of power conference programs are, in some fashion, frontloading payments this spring. Most if not all of the major NIL brands are believed to be in that group, including Georgia, FSU, Miami, Michigan, Clemson, Ohio State, Florida, Tennessee, etc.
However, schools that are frontloading are taking an inherent risk, said Jason Belzer, founder of SANIL (Student Athlete NIL), an organization that manages more than 50 collectives across the nation. Receiving a majority of their salaries before even summer workouts are complete, will players be incentivized to compete at a high enough level during the season? Will some take the cash received January-March and enter the spring portal in April?
Also, what happens after the impacts of the frontloading are over in Year 2 of the revenue-sharing calendar?
“The market is going to be overinflated,” Belzer answers. “Kids are going to say, ‘You paid the previous kid two times more than me?!’”
The GM
Seated at his desk within LSU’s newly renovated football operations building, Austin Thomas, the program’s general manager, gestures at the computer before him.
It holds his secret weapon: a software database system that assigns monetary values to each of LSU’s roster positions and each player at that position (starter, rotational player, backup, etc.). It’s an NFL-like model that he and athletic director Scott Woodward refined during visits this summer to NFL franchises like the Seattle Seahawks.
As Thomas inputs new values at one position, all other position values change so that LSU will remain under the revenue-share cap. For example, if a program decides on a given year to spend 15 percent of their pool on the quarterback position — about the going rate in the NFL — it means all other positions cannot exceed 85%.
According to Kelly, LSU is assigning a hierarchy pay system based on experience and playing time.
“It’s fascinating,” Kelly says. “You start with your initial capital outlay at key positions: quarterback, cornerback, defensive end. You can track a freshman who is going to be your third stringer. Well, he’s only getting $125,000 or $85,000. So if he’s getting offered $1 million to transfer, there’s nothing to talk about. If Miami wants to give our third-stringer $1 million, good luck to them.”
The system was essential in both recruiting the portal class and retaining (or not retaining) players.
“We said, ‘If Player X goes through this threshold, we’ve got to let him go,’” Thomas says.
“It’s about discipline,” Woodward says. “If you deviate from your plan, you sink your ship.”
Thomas, on his third stint at LSU, is one of the most notable general managers in college football because, in many ways, he was the first. Ed Orgeron named him general manager in 2016, and he’s believed to be the first staff member to hold such a title in major college football.
He helped construct the talent-laden 2019 LSU team that won the national title, left for Texas A&M to help build the Aggies’ 2020 Orange Bowl squad and, most recently, worked with Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin to sign two of the best back-to-back portal classes in college football history.
He’s an analytical nerd, a father of three boys and the behind-the-scenes engine of LSU’s latest aggressive NIL attack since Woodward hired him last January.
Here in Baton Rouge, especially lately, Thomas evolved from a numbers-crunching, talent evaluator to a blistering fundraiser. He assembled a two-hour presentation — his database included — that he showed to more than a dozen of the school’s top donors last fall, many of them hesitant to give significant amounts to NIL.
He and Woodward educated them on NIL’s importance, walked them through the program’s monetary value system and, in the end, delivered a clear message: We need your help financially to make this all happen.
“There have been some programs that have spent at a very high level, much higher than the traditional powers like us, Georgia, Alabama,” Woodward acknowledges. “There have been some that have spent two and three times us.”
As part of the presentation, Woodward and Thomas showed boosters the spending from those other programs, including Thomas’ former place of employment.
“Well,” remembers Rutland, the LSU donor who saw the presentation, “we were trailing Ole Miss.”
The Donors
In Kelly’s first season in 2022, LSU’s football roster earned about $2 million from its collective as part of a plan to pay players each a similar, low five-figure amount — it was a way to preserve and maintain team culture and unity. To that end, Kelly accepted few transfers.
In their last 24 power conference games, dating back to November 2022, the Tigers are 15-9 — a lowly mark for a program with three national titles since 2003 and one paying its coach $10 million a year.
In an interview from his office last month, Kelly says he intentionally built the program with high school players to avoid “resetting” the team each season with transfers.
“After Year 3, we had enough foundation and young players in our program that we could really now, this year, invest into the portal,” he said.
However, as Thomas, staff members and coaches pursued possible transfers late in the fall last year, a problem emerged.
They didn’t have enough money.
Kelly, one of the more blunt and honest coaches in college football, details the conversations with players, agents and their families.
“The NFL salary cap is $252 million,” he says. “Let’s say conservatively that we at LSU are operating on a $14 million (roster budget). That’s $252 million to $14 million and we were told that a linebacker should be getting the same in the NFL as he is at LSU?”
This elicits a chuckle from a reporter.
“Glad you’re laughing,” Kelly replied. “We laughed until we had to cry. Those numbers are real. What was hard to navigate: professional agents with that mindset. They knew NIL was ending. They knew it. It’s over. So, they were going to get their shot.”
Thus, in December, the fundraising effort began in earnest with a group of three to five high-level donors followed by another group of about a dozen.
Kelly visited at least one of them, Rutland, at his Baton Rouge office.
“I do remember telling Coach Kelly when he came to our office,” Rutland said, “‘I bet you’d never thought you’d be in a situation like this when you came to LSU.’”
Replied Kelly: “You’re right.”
The cash dash got started with a call to Spaht, a California-based private equity investment executive and brother to Carlos, the collective’s attorney. The Spahts grew up in Baton Rouge, attended high school here and their grandfather even served years ago on the university’s board of supervisors.
While Carlos attended LSU, Holden graduated from Dartmouth and received his master’s at Harvard before launching into a private equity career that, in an understatement, has been quite successful.
Holden Spaht’s net worth, according to Forbes, is $3.7 billion.
Reached by phone earlier this week, Holden politely declined comment. Carlos describes Holden as an obsessive LSU football fan despite not attending the school. He’s delivered multiple seven-figure gifts toward the football team’s NIL efforts, according to those with knowledge of the donations.
“He loves LSU football. He’s led the charge,” said Carlos.
He’s gotten others involved too at a high level, such as Todd Graves, the founder of Raising Cane’s, a native of New Orleans who grew up in Baton Rouge and a man valued at $9.6 billion.
The list goes on. It includes Gordon McKernan, an attorney in Baton Rouge who first led LSU’s NIL efforts in 2021 by signing dozens of players to endorsement and commercial contracts. He has spent more than $2 million on LSU’s NIL efforts and was part of the fundraising effort last December.
Reached this week, McKernan expressed concern about the sustainability of such giving. Sure, LSU donors hit their mark this time around. But what about next year and the next? He expects NIL to continue to exist in the revenue-share era as programs attempt to exceed the revenue-share cap by finding authentic deals for their athletes.
Can LSU keep pace?
“Louisiana, from an economic standpoint, isn’t as robust as the state of Texas or Florida where they have a much bigger population pool with more wealthy people,” he said. “If we have $20 million and Texas has $20 million, as long as you have legitimate deals, Texas could go up to $24 or $26 million.”
Woodward acknowledges that LSU does not have “one guy who writes the whole big check” like some schools. But it does have a legion of fans who have recently sprung into action with donations through the Tiger Athletic Foundation, the school’s non-profit fundraising arm that provides LSU millions annually to fund scholarships, facilities renovation and construction and, now, NIL to athletes.
In July, the foundation struck an agreement with the school’s collective to assume NIL fundraising, using its staff of nine frontline fundraisers to generate immediate cash for Bayou Traditions and provide TAF benefits — seat licensing and priority points — to donors. More than 3,500 donors have made 4,000 individual NIL-specific donations since July, said Matt Borman, TAF’s president and chief executive officer.
According to those familiar with the financials, the collective is receiving an average of nearly $2 million a month in NIL-specific gifts, many of those the large, seven-figure donations made in December.
“At 8-4, we needed to pay more. There’s no other way to say it,” said Russell Mosely, a Baton Rouge business owner and one of the original founders of Bayou Traditions. “And if we don’t pay more, we’re going to get stuck at 8-4.”
The Future
Within LSU’s football operations building, just down the hall from Austin Thomas’ office is a room full of recruiting staff members working diligently.
They’re performing reconnaissance on LSU’s next transfer portal class.
“You have to be ready when guys enter the portal and be one of the first people to communicate with them,” Thomas says.
With this year’s portal class, LSU valued production more than anything. The group of 16 players started a combined 104 power conference games last season — the most of any transfer class in the SEC and, perhaps, in the country.
The group includes former starting receivers at Kentucky (Barion Brown) and Oklahoma (Nic Anderson), starting offensive linemen at Northwestern (Josh Thompson) and Virginia Tech (Braelin Moore) and three defensive ends with more than 200 career tackles at FSU, Florida and Nebraska (Patrick Payton, Jack Pyburn and Jimari Butler).
It’s a high number of transfers for Thomas’ liking. The sweet spot is more in the six to 10 range, according to metrics that Thomas acquired from visiting NFL staffs.
During one of the visits, Woodward describes an “aha moment” as front office personnel described their three personnel groups: drafted players (developmental group), current players (retainment group) and free agents (new group). LSU has divided its team into three similar buckets. High school players are their developmental crew, the current roster are older guys they wish to retain and the portal provides free agents.
Thomas wants the team to be made up mostly of retained players (55-60%) — the stability and culture center of the team, he says — with high school players next (25-30%) and then, finally, players from the portal (10-15%).
Building a roster isn’t necessarily about how much money you have, Thomas says. It’s how wisely you use those funds.
“It’s an art,” he says. “Some of it is gut and intuition and feel and some is momentum and data.”
Once the revenue-share era arrives — if the House settlement is approved this spring — Thomas and Kelly will have about $13.5 million to spend starting July 1, Woodward said. Like many other schools, LSU plans to divide its revenue share pool of $20.5 million based on the House settlement’s back-damage distribution formula: 75% to football ($13.5 million); 15% to men’s basketball ($2.7 million); 5% to women’s basketball ($900,000); and 5% to all other sports ($900,000).
The school will add an unspecified number of new scholarships that will, at the very least, total $2.5 million in additional aid. That amount is then reduced from the revenue-sharing cap, dropping it to $18 million — a reason for the sport-specific amounts listed above.
“We are talking about the edges now: Who gets the last 5 percent?” Woodward said. “We are going to balance that with teams’ abilities to attract real NIL deals. That’s going to be part of the gross package.”
The future of collectives under the revenue-sharing concept is uncertain. It’s the “$1 million question,” said Bayou Traditions president Jared Wilson.
Many of them are remaining alive to operate as marketing agencies, arranging third-party NIL deals for athletes that allow a school to exceed the cap. Others are being shut down or rolled into the athletic department as a marketing wing.
Whether Bayou Traditions closes or not, donations are still necessary to the athletic department, perhaps more necessary than ever, LSU officials contend. Starting next year, schools will have an $18-20 million hole in their budget. It will grow. The revenue-share cap features built-in escalators. Within five years, the cap is expected to be closer to $30 million.
The money game is far from over.
And the pressure to win is now greater than ever.
“I’m a big Brian Kelly fan and supporter,” said Mosely, one of the LSU donors. “We’ve pushed to get the resources we need from a roster standpoint and to attract a good coaching staff. Everything is lined up for a good year. I think it’s an important year. When you make an investment — like our business owners have made — you want to see that success pay off.
“I think success in our mind is nothing short of the playoff.”
